


A Different Kind of Darkness

by SylvanWitch



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, mood piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 15:16:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15415791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Bond and Q shouldn't make sense together, but somehow they do.





	A Different Kind of Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of those musings that comes when the snakes in my brain meet a fit subject for experimentation.

The hands that had killed dozens, maybe scores, were callused, rough with scars, knotted from repeated abuse against the hard planes of an enemy’s body.

 

His own hands, which had killed hundreds, maybe thousands, were smooth, unblemished, long-fingered and pale.

 

Where the killer’s body was a map, the knife ridges and pocked valleys a testament to pain given and received, the boffin’s was an erasure, as of a hard drive wiped clean.  You couldn’t read anything in his skin; you couldn’t know what he’d suffered.  In fact, you might not be able to tell that he’d existed at all except for the sounds dragged out of him by the killer’s rough hands.

 

He had spent his life lurking underground, while men like Bond threw themselves under the unforgiving sky and against the walls of intolerance and greed and hatred and fear and carried those things back with them, buried in their bones and in their blood.

 

Q articulated none of this as he traced a scar from Bond’s lower back up the glorious swell of his ass and down again into the dark hollow where his thighs parted for the touch.

 

He didn’t romanticize Bond’s strength, didn’t pretend he wasn’t a brutal killer, a blunt instrument in Her Majesty’s hands.

 

He also didn’t pretend that Bond’s gun-callused grip on Q’s throat didn’t make him moan for want of the oblivion it promised. He had given up lying to himself when he’d embraced the lie he was for the world.

 

In their death wish, they were equally matched, and it was part of Q’s appeal to the agent, he thought, just as his smooth skin that said nothing, asked nothing but to shiver beneath Bond’s punishing touch—well, it must be restful, at least, to have the certainty of a blank skin upon which to write a different kind of history.

 

They didn’t speak of what happened in the night or the afternoon or the morning after a mission when Bond would rumble into Q’s department to drop off his abused tech and then prowl back out, trailing the stench of cordite and need in his wake.

 

Q just found a reason to leave the office, shrugging off the curious looks of his colleagues, who hadn’t guessed—wouldn’t—that here was a marriage of true minds, the kind that made black holes in deep space.

 

He’d meet him in a storage closet secured by a stroke of Q’s finger, or in Bond’s car, the seat reclined, windows blackened to pitch.

 

He’d meet him sometimes elsewhere, in the bathroom of a bar, a hotel service corridor, once in the disused anthropology stacks at the university library.

 

It was a mark of the self-fulfilling prophecy of those encounters that they were finally horizontal and naked together now.

Somewhen along the way, Bond had come to expect Q’s closed eyes, twisted mouth, his pleading with his red, red lips for succor.

 

Q hadn’t expected he’d surrender something fundamental.  For all his intelligence, he hadn’t foreseen what swam up out of the cold dark depths of Bond’s eyes, hadn’t known that need could become hunger could become…what—Love?

 

Surely not.

 

Or perhaps.  With Bond, Q had gotten used to being wrong.  It was a different kind of delight to be unable to predict the pattern.

 

Bond muttered something on an exhale and swept his hand down Q’s body, stopping to cup his flaccid cock, to stroke a gentle line between his balls.

 

“You are so lovely,” Bond said before wrapping his hard hand around Q’s thigh and leaving a deliberate bruise in the shape of possession there.

 

Q gasped at the pain, at the thick aching rightness of it, and then rolled onto his side to bite Bond’s nipple and wring a curse out of him.

 

They were both too tired to pursue the pain further.  Sticky with sweat and spend, sated on the violent sweetness of their mutual consummation, they fell back side by side and touched only at the bony points—ball of the shoulder, knob of wrist and knee.

 

They slept as the sterile cool air of the neutral safehouse room washed over them, and then they arose from their respective places, showered, shrugged back into the skins they wore for the world, and did not share a kiss or a smile at the door.

 

Q went first, slipping out into a grey and drizzling London morn.

 

Bond followed shortly after, watching Q’s back, assuring their safety.

 

Later, they might have dinner—a first date of sorts—or settle into the couch at one flat or the other. 

 

Later, they might exchange words they’d so far held behind their teeth.

 

Later they might even wake entangled after spending a whole night murmuring one another’s names.

 

For now, it was enough that Q was known, that his hands that had killed could remember another kind of annihilating touch, that hands that had also killed could tease from his cold and obscure flesh some other object than death.

 

Death stalked London in two guises, drenched in grey rain, waiting for the next time they were called to make something into nothing but also remembering, down deep in the hidden places some might call their souls, the times they’d made nothing into something, shaped one another out of darkness and back into darkness of a different, warmer sort.


End file.
